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Friday, July 6, 2012

from the first draft of my introduction to A Poet's Sourcebook: Writings about Poetry, from the Ancient World to the Present,selected by me [Autumn House Press, 2013]:

“How far we are going to read a
poet when we can read about a poet is a problem to lay before biographers,”
wrote Virginia Woolf, in a not entirely complimentary essay about Elizabeth
Barrett Browning’s novel-poem Aurora Leigh.
Yet as Woolf well knew, the back story offers its own illuminations; and “we
may suspect that Elizabeth Barrett was inspired by a flash of true genius when
she rushed into the drawing-room and said that here, where we live and work, is
the true place for the poet.”

As I sifted among
my choices for this anthology, I found myself returning again and again to
Woolf’s remarks. Why do we hover between reading a poet and reading about a
poet? And how does poetry come from where we live and work? These are questions
that poets, and the watchers of poets, have been pondering for millennia; and
if there is any overarching theme to A Poet's Sourcebook, it lingers within those perplexities.

Neither a craft
handbook nor a theory manual, this anthology is merely one reader’s record of
the long human need to make poetry. For no matter how distant in time those
individuals have become, reading about that need, in both their own words and
the words of others, keeps our relationship with them intimate and immediate.
Suetonius explains Virgil’s revision process; Sir Philip Sidney argues with
Aristotle; Emily Brontë peels potatoes and creates an imaginary country;
Phillis Wheatley tries on John Milton’s syntax for size; Walt Whitman invents a
manifesto for a poetic tribe that doesn’t yet exist; Audre Lorde sings the body
electric; Jack Wiler rants about high school; ten-year-old Ethan Richard
complains that poetry “always spouts the truth you don’t want other people to
hear in public.”

In her novel Daniel
Deronda, George Eliot writes:

A human life, I
think, should be well rooted in some spot of a native land, where it may get
the love of tender kinship for the face of the earth, for the labours men go
forth to, for the sounds and accents that haunt it, for whatever will give that
early home a familiar unmistakable difference amid the future widening of
knowledge: a spot where the definiteness of early memories may be inwrought
with affection, and kindly acquaintance with all neighbours, even to the dogs
and donkeys, may spread not by sentimental effort and reflection, but as a
sweet habit of the blood.

As I worked on
this anthology, I became increasingly aware of my “tender kinship” for these
writers, past and present, distant and near, who are, in some deep ancient way,
my flesh and bones. The native land we share is poetry, and the very act of
choosing these particular voices from among all the other voices of history was
like embarking alongside them on a voyage to our collective home. Yet at the
same time I was discovering how personal any such compendium must be; how,
despite all efforts at universality, it ends up reflecting its editor’s
obsessions and limitations.

2 comments:

I love the phrase "a sweet habit of the blood" that you use in your intro. It's rich in its implications.

The Woolf quote is both apt and thought-provoking. I've read the book about the Anne Sexton tapes and am reading now Christian Wiman's collection of essays, which are wonderful and very personal. Just yesterday I read an interview with Dana Gioia in Image Journal. In all these cases, I've learned things that enhance my reading of the poetry of these three very different poets.

I have loved that George Eliot quotation since I first read it, 18 years ago, lying in a hotel bed in London. It seemed to encapsulate everything I wistfully dreamed that one might become as both a writer and a neighbor. And the Woolf essay in its entirety (it's called "Autora Leigh" and is in the 2d Common Reader) is very interesting. Unfortunately I couldn't afford to reprint it in the anthology, but it's an ambiguous disquisition on the prose-poetry differential as well the definition of feminist writing. Take a look at it sometime.